Power consumption is a critical constraint in the design of both hardware and software for portable embedded systems. Many portable embedded systems are targeted towards streaming multimedia applications such as audio and video decoding. Typically, these multimedia applications exhibit a high variability in their computational demand.
Existing dynamic voltage/frequency scaling and dynamic power management techniques exploit this variability and slow down or switch-off the processor during periods of low demand in order to save energy. These techniques rely on predicting the variation of the computational demand and often using control-theoretic feedback schemes. However, such feedback schemes are computationally expensive and prone to errors.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a technique or scheme that seeks to address at least one of the above-mentioned problems.